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The 100 or so cars are empty, Pan Am Railways said Thursday. They have been parked on a storage track for a month. And they’re not likely to move until global oil markets change.

“As soon as the customer requests them, they will go back out,” said Cynthia Scarano, executive vice president of Pan Am Railways.

Scarano would not name the customer, but all of the crude oil that has been moving across Maine for the past two years has gone to the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Now that flow, hundreds of thousands of barrels a month at its peak, has slowed to a trickle.

Irving Oil doesn’t discuss its business practices. But media reports and the sailing schedule at the Port of Saint John suggest that the refinery now is getting more crude by ship and barge.

Behind the shift is the difference between the price of crude oil from Canada and the United States and the price of overseas production.

The surge of oil production in Alberta’s oil sands and North Dakota’s Bakken field over the last two years has led to a scramble to get the crude to market. With several pipeline projects stalled by environmental and community opposition, oil shippers have taken to the rails with record volumes.

Maine has been part of that trend. Millions of barrels moved on Pan Am Railways tracks and, until the derailment and deadly explosion of a train carrying crude July 6 in Quebec, on the Maine, Montreal & Atlantic Railway.

But the oil-by-rail trend, which raised public concern after the disaster in Quebec, began slowing this summer.

Early last winter, the benchmark for domestic crude had a $23-a-barrel price advantage over imported oil. But in the past six months, the spread between two benchmark crude prices — one for domestic production and the other for North Sea oil — has narrowed almost to parity.

Oil prices are volatile, and many analysts expect the spread to widen again. But for the moment, the price advantage that prompted Irving Oil, Canada’s largest refinery, to bring in crude by rail has faded.

That shift is being felt by Pan Am Railways. In March, it moved more than 385,000 barrels of crude headed to Irving Oil. This month, only a small fraction of that is scheduled to move.

The slowdown is visible to railroad watchers, said Steve Boyko, who writes about the industry on his blog, Confessions of a Train Geek.

Boyko, who is in contact with a colleague who lives near the Pan Am Railways tracks on the Maine border in McAdam, New Brunswick, said the long strings of black oil cars known as unit trains are no longer running. Instead, he sees a few oil tankers mixed into a freight train.

Irving also can receive crude over Canadian National Railway tracks, which run north of Maine. Canadian National Railway said earlier this summer that it expected oil by rail to keep increasing, but that the picture could change if narrow price spreads continued.

Even when oil-by-rail was at its peak, Irving Oil was receiving most of its supply by sea.

The refinery has the capacity to make 300,000 barrels of gasoline, heating oil and other petroleum products a day. A rail tank car holds about 700 barrels of oil. So even if the 100 tank cars now parked in Yarmouth were full and headed to Saint John, they would meet only a fraction of the refinery’s daily needs.

Instead, Irving relies mostly on marine deliveries at its deepwater terminal. September’s vessel activity report for the Port of Saint John shows at least nine oil tankers set to bring crude to Irving Oil.

A frequent caller, the Genmar Defiance, is 787 feet long and can carry about 600,000 barrels of crude from overseas. It called this week at Irving’s Canaport terminal.

Irving Oil also receives crude from North Dakota that is brought by train to Albany, N.Y., then put on ships and barges for a trip down the Hudson River. This weekend, a smaller terminal in Saint John is expecting a delivery from Albany on the 590-foot Afrodite, which can hold 220,000 barrels of crude.

So, for the near future, the role of railroads in moving oil across Maine is unclear. That means the tank cars in Yarmouth may sit for a while.

Both Scarano and Boyko said it’s common for customers who lease rail cars to store them near where they’re needed. That way, when markets do change, they don’t have to hunt down cars in other parts of the country.

Boyko, who lives in Manitoba, said he remembers when the 2009 recession killed the domestic automobile market. The special rail cars built to carry autos were stored on track sidings for years, he said.

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